The Address Locator Tool is an online tool built for the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD). It uses information from different sources and different formats. The intention of this file is to document those sources and the intermediate steps required to make the data ready to use it as an input of the tool
This file is for internal use and is not intended to be distributed with anyone outside the organization.
This section is organized in the following way: each source of information has its own section and has the code used to create the final dataset. All dataset can be downloaded as a .csv or .pdf. Each section also has an R script that has more information about each data source.
DHCD provides payment standards for 23 Metropolitan areas in the State of Massachusetts. All the cities and towns within each area share the same payment standard for units with 0 to 4 bedroom. The basic geographical unit is the boundaries of a city or a town. To update the DHCD Payment Standards file, there are several intermediate steps required to make the information useful.
As mention above, DHCD provides payment standards for 23 Metropolitan areas in the State of Massachusetts. The list of DHCD Metropolitan areas is given by the following file. To make this data easy to handle, it has been translated into the following Excel file. All our work regarding DHCD Payment Standard will take this file as the base file.
## Reading layer `ma_municipalities' from data source `/Users/lauticantar/Google Drive/DHCD-tool/data/shapefiles/ma_municipalities' using driver `ESRI Shapefile'
## Simple feature collection with 351 features and 5 fields
## geometry type: MULTIPOLYGON
## dimension: XY
## bbox: xmin: -73.50821 ymin: 41.23875 xmax: -69.92751 ymax: 42.88678
## epsg (SRID): 4326
## proj4string: +proj=longlat +datum=WGS84 +no_defs
To check that the original file covers all the cities and towns across the State of Massachusetts, we can do the following test. We downloaded a shapefile of all the municipalities in Massachusetts from MassGIS and compare the number of cities and towns between the original file and one downloaded. The original file is not complete. There are 351 municipalities in Massachusetts, but the original file only has 318. There are 33 less. The following map shows that most of the missing cities and towns are from Franklin County.